Due to the increasing expense of wood and lumber, efforts have been made to construct a pallet of the type for use in material handling from alternative materials such as wood chips, wood pulp and wood particles.
Examples of pallets comprised of composite wood material are illustrated in the Coughey et al. U.S. Pat. No. 4,248,163 issued Feb. 3, 1981; and the Haataja U.S. Pat. No. 4,408,544 issued Oct. 11, 1983, assigned to the assignee of the present invention.
A method for molding articles such as wood pallets from loosely felted mats of wood flakes is also illustrated in the Haataja U.S. Pat. No. 4,440,708, issued Apr. 3, 1984 and in the Haataja U.S. Pat. No. 4,337,710, issued July 6, 1982. Those patents illustrate a method and apparatus for molding composite wood flake pallets wherein a loosely felted mat of wood flakes is positioned on a lower press die. The loosely felted mat is comprised of elongated thin wood flakes with the flakes lying in horizontal planes and with the flakes having a random orientation in those planes. The die includes a plurality of cavities which form the integral downwardly extending legs of the pallet. Male die members of an upper die extrude the mat material down into the cavities in the lower die during compression of the mat to form the legs of the pallet.
During the compression of the mat, the wood flake material in the area of the die cavities forming the legs is extruded downwardly into the cavities. In applications where the legs are relatively long, there is substantial extrusion of the mat material into the die cavities, and in some applications, the mat material may be pulled apart to form voids in the compressed mat, and in some applications these voids result in localized weaknesses in the pallet.